First Papers (13 page)

The melody of the Strauss waltz was like wine, and a joyous giddiness entered her spirit. Hop, hop, hop on the right foot, change; hop, hop, hop on the left. Slide and jump to the right, slide and jump to the left. The three hops once more, then a deep bend to the right, a deep bend to the left.

It was glorious. Humming became harder as her breathing grew labored, and after a moment, her lips opened of themselves and she gave up humming in favor of singing. Her voice was a high soprano, thin and untrained, but it struck her own ear now as almost beautiful.

On the wooden floor, with nothing but a little space underneath and then sand, her bare feet made more of a thump than they did at home; she raised her voice to compensate for the thumping and slapping and sliding, and the very act of raising it seemed like a new assertion of freedom.

When she reached the end of the melody, she paused, as she did at home when the record had to be turned over. Only then did she become aware of voices behind her, and she looked over her shoulder to the back of the tent. Outside, on the wood sidewalk, watching, were four or five children and several women.

Fleetingly Alexandra thought, Oh, my goodness, it’s good the girls aren’t here. As the people outside saw her turn toward them, one of the women laughed derisively and left, and another took her child’s hand to lead him away.

“No,” the child shouted. “I want to see some more.”

“Come, Morris,” his mother said, speaking in Yiddish. “Or you know what’ll happen.”

“I want to see the crazy lady do it again.”

“You want—” his mother shouted, and slapped him across the face; the child yelled but didn’t budge. Once again the raised hand smacked him. His screams rose to the heavens.

By now Alexandra was outside, still panting, but smiling vaguely. To the mother of the screaming child she said politely, “Have you ever tried it?” and at the confused look on the other’s face, she repeated her question, this time in Yiddish.

“Tried it?” The woman eyed her cautiously.

“Dancing for exercise,” Alexandra said cheerily. “It makes you feel young.”

“Young,” the woman said. “Maybe a little crazy.” She started off, but Alexandra put a hand on her arm.

“Don’t go,” Alexandra said. “Could you come in for a moment?”

At the astonishment on the other’s face, Alexandra said, “You know I’m not crazy, so do come in for a minute. But without little Morris—I really would like to talk something over with you alone.”

One of the other women now leaned forward and whispered to the one Alexandra had invited in; the expression on the woman’s face underwent a remarkable change. “Why didn’t you tell me before?” she demanded of the whisperer, and turning back to Alexandra she said, “Is it true? Your husband is Ivarin?”

“Yes,” Alexandra said. Pride in Stefan suffused her. Away from New York, living out on Long Island, it was easy to forget that to people like these, working people from the East Side, Stefan was famous, a public figure, a hero.

“My husband is in cloaks, he’s a cutter,” the woman said, giving a shove of dismissal to her child, who was still screaming. “He tells me every word Ivarin says from the platform at union meetings. He reads every word he writes in the
Jewish News.
If I had dreamed who you are! But we only arrived here yesterday—”

Alexandra touched her finger to her lips, as if she were hushing a child. “
‘Who’
isn’t important,” she said, leading the way back into the tent, pulling a chair forward for her visitor, and stooping to fight a burner on the kerosene stove. “If you would permit me, though, I’d like to talk to you about your little boy.”

“My Morris?”

“That’s why I wanted you to come in without him. Please tell me your name; I don’t know what to call you.”

“Godleberg,” she said. “I’m so excited I forgot. Anna Godleberg, my husband’s name is Dave, the boy is Morris, another boy is Louis, he’s four years older, and a baby, Rebecca, we call her Reba.”

“How do you do, Mrs. Godleberg,” Alexandra said, as if she were acknowledging an introduction made by a third person.

“About Morris, you said?” Mrs. Godleberg rushed on. “He drives me wild, he’s a terror, he never minds me, he—”

“No child,” Alexandra put in mildly, “is born a terror. Of course, it’s none of my business, but—”

“Please, it
is
your business,” the other said. “The wife of Ivarin? Anything you like is your business.”

Alexandra dropped her tentative tone. “Then if I may, I think
you
are turning him into a terror.”

Her visitor stared at her in amazement. “I’m turning him?” she demanded. “I’d give ten years of my life if I could make him be a good boy.”

“Smacking a child across the face,” Alexandra said, “yelling at him, shoving
him
—all of that is old-fashioned now.”

There was silence, hostile, unwilling silence on Mrs. Godleberg’s part, patient silence on Alexandra’s. As she waited, she remembered one of her first pupils, years ago when she also had begun to give private lessons in the evening, to add to Stefan’s earnings. At the beginning, whenever she penciled in a correction in the pupil’s exercise book, writing in her blue crayon over the misspelled or misused word—whether it was an important error or the merest nothing, the pupil would respond with that same unwilling, hostile silence, as if a teacher were unspeakably rude to teach.

“Old-fashioned?” Mrs. Godleberg asked at last.

“Modern methods of discipline are nothing like the old way
we
were brought up. It’s something we can all learn. Have you ever heard of Madame Montessori?”

“Never.”

“A woman doctor in Italy, Marie Montessori, the first woman doctor Italy ever had. She became interested in the right way to educate a child, train a child, help him develop—”

For the next half-hour, as she watched her visitor’s face grow absorbed in the Montessori Method, as she answered the first uncertain questions, felt the other’s springing eagerness to learn, Alexandra Ivarin was elated and happy.

“I only wish, Mrs. Ivarin, I had met you long ago, when I was carrying my first child. How can I know such things? Who is to tell me?”

“Well, I’ve started,” Alexandra said.

“It is too late now. That Morris—nothing I could do, nothing I could learn—”

“Don’t be so sure,” Alexandra said. “You can at least try. And then, remember, there’s your baby, little Reba.”

“You remember her name!”

“Even if it
is
late with Morris,” Alexandra went on, “you have a fresh start right now, with her.”

“Oh, how can I thank you, Mrs. Ivarin? I have a friend here, Sadie Cohen, her two children are worse than my Morris. If she could only hear what you told me—”

“Ask her to come over with you, next time.”

“You wouldn’t mind? You mean it?”

“I mean it.”

And so it was that a few nights later, Anna Godleberg and her friend Sadie Cohen, and Mrs. Cohen’s friend Esther Malowitch, and Mrs. Malowitch’s friend, Sophie Jabrowsky, all came to the Ivarin tent after supper, and sat on chairs and cots while Alexandra talked to them about the Montessori Method.

Fee and Franny left just before they arrived, to visit new friends at the far end of the tent city. They both told their mother they were glad she was meeting friends of her own, and they had been fascinated by the story of the screaming Morris and his mother (though Alexandra had not deemed it necessary, for the moment, to tell them of the dancing which had brought Morris into her life).

“If you like it, Mama, why shouldn’t you have a little lecture club?” Fran said, and Alexandra was relieved that there was none of her usual “Oh, Mama.”

“Not a lecture club,” Alexandra said. “Only Papa can lecture or write. But teaching is something we both can do, he and I equally.”

“You’re a teacher by nature,” Fee informed her. “Papa said so to the Paiges once; I heard him.”

A teacher by nature, Alexandra thought. It’s true. It makes me happy when I teach an immigrant how to read English and write it and spell it. But this kind of teaching, about their children who have to grow up here in America? Could any other teaching be as good to do as that?

Off and on, for the rest of the summer, Alexandra gave one or two evenings a week to groups of women like this first group of Anna Godleberg’s friends, groups that shifted and changed and grew. At times there were six women to listen to her, at times twenty, using every available chair and cot, sitting on the wood flooring, looking up at her.

Each time she varied her subject matter as the occasion suggested, improvising as she went along, astonished at how she could hold their interest with many of her own favorite topics—the value of whole grains, the danger in denatured foods, the justice of woman suffrage, labor’s right to organize and bargain for a ten-hour day and a six-day week, with extra pay for anything over those minimums.

But invariably it was her discussions of their daily problems with their children that awoke the strongest response, the greatest willingness to hear more.

“You must write all this down, in a book, Mrs. Ivarin,” Anna Godleberg said on the eve of her departure for the heat of a Rivington Street tenement. “Every Jewish woman in America would read it.”

“A book? My husband is the author in our family.”

“But men know nothing about children,” Sophie Jabrowsky said. “Even your famous husband—is he fine with your children?”

Alexandra passed the question by. But that night, unable to sleep for the excitement racing through her mind, she wondered how one went about writing a textbook for immigrant women. The chief section would be about children; another might give them a basic grounding in diet and health, with perhaps some American recipes, too, and surely a section to teach these poor harried women how to organize their hours, so they would not be forever trapped in the sloppy slavery of housework.

A book! How gigantic a task it would be. A mountain of pages piled up in the eye of her mind; she felt exhausted and dejected at the idea of it. And yet she could not stop thinking about it.

At last her eyes closed and she dozed, waked, slept, but never deeply or surely. At the first sifting of light across her eyelids, she went and sat down at the front of the tent, on the edge of the flooring. To her bare feet the sand was cold, but the pinkish silver tint of it pleased her. The sky was streaked with pearly yellows, and a few stars were still visible, reluctant to yield to the new day. Far off the cries of unseen gulls sounded, and Alexandra’s heart seemed to swoop and circle with them, in a reaching thrusting longing for she knew not what.

It was larger than wanting to write a book to help ignorant women with the thousand problems life showered upon them; that was part of it, but it was larger and more formless.

She thought of Stefan, standing at the side of the gas range, eating stone-hard eggs, perfectly contented, doing very well without her, without the Polish servant girl. His life is so full, she thought, that he feels no emptiness, no matter what changes around him.

So far my life has been as full as his. But Eli is already gone, Francesca has a birthday next month, and even the little one was eleven in June. Life is emptying; it always empties earlier for women than for men.

Jealousy struck her, jealousy of Stefan, of all men. Until they are tottering and senile, she thought, they can go on with
their
kind of usefulness. Stefan will go on lecturing and editing the paper until he is seventy, but in another few years I will be finished.

Fear assailed her, an apprehension she had never known, dark and thick. She stood up, went inside and stood looking down at her two girls, sweet in their young sleep.

For another little while, she thought. A few years more.

L
ETTY HEARD HIM COMING
up the stairs and she went out into the hall to meet him, holding the door almost closed so he could not see past her, into the room. He looked up and said, “You look as excited as a kid.”

She said, “I told you I’d finish in time,” and lifted his jacket from his arm where he had been carrying it. His shirt was damp through, and he wore the summertime look of all men coming home from work in New York City, but he was cheerful and impatient for her to open the door and let him see.

She waited for an instant and then flung it wide.

He stopped on the threshold. Behind him she said, “They make a difference, don’t they?”

“They’re beautiful.” The three windows that had been tall blank rectangles that morning now were curtained in the dark-red fabric she had been working on for weeks. He looked at the rest of the room, slowly, seeing everything, knowing how much it meant to her that he see and approve. She had done it all; with an occasional workman in for a few hours at a time, to build the bookcases or put up curtain rods, she had created this herself, and she was right to feel proud.

“They
will
like it, won’t they?” she asked.

“They’ll be flabbergasted.”

His mother and father were coming to dinner, “allowed to” at last, two months after he and Letty had moved in, and he tried to see it as they would see it, completed, whole, all at once, not step by step as he had been seeing it since June.

He looked at the long red curtains again, so simple, yet so—what was the right word? He didn’t know the proper language for curtains or furniture or ornaments; he was foreign in this world that was so familiar to Letty and so obedient to her skill.

“I’m flabbergasted too,” he said and kissed her. “But I’ve been that ever since I discovered this about you.”

She was delighted. “I wish it would hurry and get dark, so we could light the candles for dinner. And it’s a pity we can’t light a fire too.”

“It was ninety-eight in the lab, and in the office one of the stenographers fainted.”

It was the first week in August, and the first experience for each of them of a summer in New York. Born in Maine, Letty had never known such relentless heat, worse at night than under the noon sun on a village street at home. But she was so happy that at last they had a place of their own, that she never complained, and never slackened in the thousand things she had set herself to do.